Part 1

THE LITTLE REVIEW

_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

DECEMBER, 1914

Poems Richard Aldington A Great Pilgrim-Pagan George Soule My Friend, the Incurable: Ibn Gabirol On Germanophobia; on the perils of Monomania; on Raskolinkov and Alexander Berkman; on surrogates and sundry subtleties. On Poetry: Aesthetics and Common-Sense Llewellyn Jones In Defense of Vers Libre Arthur Davison Ficke The Decorative Straight-Jacket Maxwell Bodenheim Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Eunice Tietjens Scharmel Iris Milo Winter The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore Llewellyn Jones Amy Lowell’s Contribution M. C. A. Star Trouble Helen Hoyt Parasite Conrad Aiken Personality George Burman Foster The Prophecy of Gwic’hlan Edward Ramos Editorials and Announcements Winter Rain Eunice Tietjens Home as an Emotional Adventure The Editor A Miracle Charles Ashleigh London Letter E. Buxton Shanks New York Letter George Soule The Theatre, Music, Art Book Discussion Sentence Reviews

Published Monthly

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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago.

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. I

DECEMBER, 1914

No. 9

Poems

RICHARD ALDINGTON

On a Motor-Bus at Night

(Oxford Street)

The hard rain-drops beat like wet pellets On my nose and right cheek As we jerk and slither through the traffic.

There is a great beating of wheels And a rumble of ugly machines.

The west-bound buses are full of men In grey clothes and hard hats, Holding up umbrellas Over their sallow faces As they return to the suburban rabbit-holes. The women-clerks Try to be brightly dressed; Now the wind makes their five-shilling-hats jump And the hat-pins pull their hair.

When one is quite free, and curious, They are fascinating to look at— Poor devils of a sober hell.

The shop-lamps and the street-lamps Send steady rayed floods of yellow and red light So that Oxford street is paved with copper and chalcedony.

Church Walk, Kensington

(Sunday Morning)

The cripples are going to church. Their crutches beat upon the stones, And they have clumsy iron boots.

Their clothes are black, their faces peaked and mean; Their legs are withered Like dried bean-pods.

Their eyes are as stupid as frogs’.

And the god, September, Has paused for a moment here Garlanded with crimson leaves. He held a branch of fruited oak. He smiled like Hermes the beautiful Cut in marble.

A Great Pilgrim-Pagan

GEORGE SOULE

Shakespeare in red morocco seems always wan and pathetic. I see him looking gloomily out of his unread respectability, bored with his scholarly canonization and his unromantic owners. How he longs for the irresponsible days when he was loved or ignored for his own sake! Now he is forever imprisoned in marble busts and tortured in Histories of English Literature. There is no more tragic fate in the annals of imagination. Terrible is the vengeance taken by institutional culture on those who are great enough to command its admiration.

Therefore, a genius who has not been tagged unduly by the pundits inspires me with a profound delicacy, in a sense akin to the reverence for a beautiful child. Here is a virtue which the world needs. One would like to proclaim it from the housetops. Yet there are the rabble, ready with their election-night enthusiasm, and the scholars, with their pompous niches. If one could only find all those whom the man himself would have selected as friends and whisper the right word in their ears! But, after all, we must speak in public, remembering that even misunderstanding is the birthright of the genius. It is better that power should be expressed in devious and unforeseen channels than not at all.

A flippant friend once told me that he had never had the courage to read William Vaughn Moody because the poet had such a dark brown name. That is important because of its triviality. I have no doubt that if the gospel hymns had never been written, and if we had never on gloomy Sunday evenings seen those pale books with the scroll-work Moody-and-Sankey covers, bringing all their dismal train of musical and religious doggerel, we should have been spared many misgivings about the evangelist’s vicarious name-sake. Let it be firmly understood, therefore, that there is nothing dark brown, or evangelistic, or stupidly sober-serious about the new poet of the Fire-Bringer. May he never go into a household-classics edition!

But there is a tinge of New England about him, just the same. Only one who has in his blood the solemn possibilities of religious emotion can react against orthodox narrowness without becoming trivial. It is the fashion to blame all modern ills on puritan traditions. We should be wise if in order to fight our evils we should invoke a little of the Pilgrim Fathers’ heroism. Too many of us take up the patter of radicalism with as little genuine sincerity as a spearmint ribbon-clerk repeats the latest Sunday-comic slang. If you have ever walked over a New England countryside the endless miles of stone walls may have set you thinking. Every one of those millions of stones has been laboriously picked out of the fields—and there are still many there. Before that the trees had to be cleared away, and the Indians fought, and the ocean crossed without chart or government buoy. For over two centuries our ancestors grimly created our country for us, with an incessant summer- and winter-courage that seems the attribute of giants. What wonder if they were hard and narrow? We scoff at their terminal morraine; but we should be more deserving of their gift if we should emulate their stout hearts in clearing away the remaining debris from the economical and spiritual fields. In spite of injurious puritan traditions there is something inalienably American and truly great about old New England. It is the same unafraid stoutness of heart that is at the bottom of Moody’s personality. It gives him power; it gives him unconscious dignity.

Yet Moody was indeed a rebel against the religious and social muddle in which he found himself. Something red and pagan poured into his veins the instinct of defiance to a jealous god and to pale customs. The best of the Greek was his; instinctively he turned at last to Greek drama for his form and to Greek mythology for his figures. There was in him that σπονδη which Aristotle believed essential for the poet—a quality so rare among us that the literal translation, “high seriousness,” conveys little hint of its warmth, its nobility and splendor. He believed in the body as in the soul; and his conception of the godly was rounded and not inhuman. Dionysus was every bit as real to him as the man of sorrows. Is not this the new spirit of America which we wish to nourish? And is there not a peculiar virtue in the poet who with the strong arm of the pilgrim and the consecration of the puritan fought for the kingdom of joy among us? In _The Masque of Judgment_ he pictures a group of heroic unrepentant rebels against divine grace who have not yet fallen under the sword of the destroying angel. Of them one, a youth, sings:

Better with captives in the slaver’s pen Hear women sob, and sit with cursing men, Yea, better here among these writhen lips, Than pluck out from the blood its old companionships. If God had set me for one hour alone, Apart from clash of sword And trumpet pealéd word, I think I should have fled unto his throne. But always ere the dayspring shook the sky, Somewhere the silver trumpets were acry,— Sweet, high, oh, high and sweet! What voice could summon so but the soul’s paraclete? Whom should such voices call but me, to dare and die? O ye asleep here in the eyrie town, Ye mothers, babes, and maids, and aged men, The plain is full of foemen! Turn again— Sleep sound, or waken half Only to hear our happy bugles laugh Lovely defiance down, As through the steep Grey streets we sweep, Each horse and man a ribbéd fan to scatter all that chaff!

How from the lance-shock and the griding sword Untwine the still small accents of the Lord? How hear the Prince of Peace and Lord of Hosts Speak from the zenith ’mid his marshalled ghosts, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay; Cease thou and come away!” Or having seen and hearkened, how refrain From crying, heart and brain, “So, Lord, Thou sayest it, Thine— But also mine, ah, surely also mine! Else why and for what good The strength of arm my father got for me By perfect chastity, This glorious anger poured into my blood Out of my mother’s depths of ardency?”

So the sanctity of the warrior. And the sanctity of other passions is there, too. A woman says:

O sisters, brothers, help me to arise! Of God’s two-hornéd throne I will lay hold And let him see my eyes; That he may understand what love can be, And raise his curse, and set his children free.

But quotations crowd upon me. Most of Moody’s best work bears witness to his glorification of man’s possible personality in rebellion against man’s restrictive conception of society and god. We have had many such rebels; the peculiar significance of Moody lies in the fact that he lacks utterly the triviality of the little radical, and that his is a power which springs from the most heroic in American quality.

Of course all this would be worth nothing unless Moody had the authentic utterance of the poet. His fulness of inspiration, combined with his sensitive editing, has left us scarcely a line which should have gone to oblivion. As an example of his magic take three lines from _I Am the Woman_, in which the woman is walking with her lover:

But I was mute with passionate prophecies; My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather, While universe drifted by after still universe.

Or the woman’s response to Pandora’s singing in _The Fire-Bringer_:

Hark, hark, the pouring music! Never yet The pools below the waterfalls, thy pools, Thy dark pools, O my heart—!

Fragmentary, mystic, unrelated with the context; yet who that has heard perfect music can fail to understand that cry? It is indeed this mystic richness, these depths below depths, that make a large part of Moody’s individual fascination. He rarely has the limpid clarity or the soaring simplicity which make the popular lyricist such as Shelley. There is too much grasp of the mind in his work for the large public; only those who have in some degree discovered the beauty of the wide ranges can feel at home in him. One breathes with the strength of great virility,—an able and demanding body, a mind which conquers the heights, and those infinitely subtle and vibrating reaches of spirit which belong especially to the poet.

To me the thought of Moody is satisfying not only because he typifies those qualities which I like to think we ought to find in American literature, but because he exemplifies my ideal of a poet. There have been many insane geniuses; men whose glory has shone sometimes fitfully through bodily or mental infirmity. Some of us are accustomed to the idea that genius is in fact insanity or is akin to it. Certainly the words “wholesome” and “healthy” have been applied so many times to mediocre productions that we are wary of them. But is not the insanity of genius after all merely the abnormal greatness and preponderance of a single quality in a man? If by some miracle his other qualities could have been equally great, would he not have been a still nobler artist? To me the Greek impulse of proportionate development has an irresistible appeal. To be sane, not by the denial of a disproportionate inspiration, but by the lifting of all the faculties to its level: that is a dream worthy of the god in man. To be an artist not by the denial of competing faculties, but by the fullest development of all faculties under an inexorable will which unites them in a common purpose: that is a rich conception of personality. The perfect poet should be the perfect man. He should be not insane, but saner than the rest of us. Moody not only expressed this ideal in his life, but in his work. He was strong and sound, physically, mentally, spiritually. No one who has read his letters can miss the golden roundness of his humor, his humanity, his manliness. Yet never for a moment did he make a comfortable denial of the will to soar. In his poem _The Death of Eve_ he has burningly expressed the development of personality. Eve, an aged woman, has not succumbed to the view that she committed an unforgivable sin in disobeying God to taste the apple. Taking old Cain with her, she fearlessly enters the garden again to show herself to God before she dies. In her mystic song she sings:

Behold, against thy will, against thy word, Against the wrath and warning of thy sword, Eve has been Eve, O Lord! A pitcher filled, she comes back from the brook, A wain she comes, laden with mellow ears; She is a roll inscribed, a prophet’s book Writ strong with characters. Behold, Eve willed it so; look, if it be so, look!

And after singing of her life and of how she had been sensitive to the love of her husband and children, she goes on:

Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she strove To be the woman they did well approve, That, narrowed to their love, She might have done with bitterness and blame; But still along the yonder edge of prayer A spirit in a fiery whirlwind came— Eve’s spirit, wild and fair— Crying with Eve’s own voice the number of her name.

Yea, turning in the whirlwind and the fire, Eve saw her own proud being all entire Made perfect by desire; And from the rounded gladness of that sphere Came bridal songs and harpings and fresh laughter; “Glory unto the faithful,” sounded clear, And then, a little after, “Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!”

And only thus does Eve find god—in her perfect self—

Ready and boon to be fulfilled of Thee, Thine ample, tameless creature,— Against thy will and word, behold, Lord, this is She!

Here, indeed, is the religion of our time. A faithfulness that is deeper than the old faithfulness; and that challenge which of all modern inspiration is the most flaming:

Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!

This is not the balance of a personality that denies itself! Like Nietzsche, Moody is shaken with the conviction that the most deadly sin is not disobedience, but smallness.

There is a striking similarity between the religious attitude of Moody and that of Nietzsche. Moody mentions Zarathustra only once in his published letters. Certainly he was not obsessed by the German, or a confessed follower. Nor did Moody elaborate any social philosophy, beyond a general radicalism quite different from Nietzsche’s condemnation of socialism. But, like Nietzsche, Moody was in reaction against a false and narrow culture. And like him, Moody found in Hellenic ideals a blood-stirring inspiration. He found not the external grace of the Greek which Keats celebrated, not the static classical perfection which has furnished an anodyne for scholars. It was the deeper, cloudy spirit of Aeschylus, the heaven-scaling challenge of Euripides, the Dionysiac worship of joy and passion. Take, for instance, the chorus of young men in _The Fire-Bringer_ which Professor Manly has called “insolent”—though it seems to me of a divine insolence:

Eros, how sweet Is the cup of thy drunkenness! Dionysus, how our feet Hasten to the burning cup Thou liftest up! But O how sweet and how most burning it is To drink the wine of thy lightsome chalices, Apollo! Apollo! To-day We say we will follow thee and put all others away For thou alone, O thou alone art he Who settest the prisoned spirit free, And sometimes leadest the rapt soul on Where never mortal thought has gone; Till by the ultimate stream Of vision and of dream She stands With startled eyes and outstretched hands, Looking where other suns rise over other lands, And rends the lonely skies with her prophetic scream.

Moody, too, transvaluates values everywhere. _The Death of Eve_ is an example of it. It is to “The Brute” that he looks for the regeneration of society. Prometheus is a heroic saviour of mankind; rebellion is his virtue, not his sin. Pandora is not a mischievous person who through her curiosity lets out all the troubles on the world, but a divine, wind-like inquirer, the inspiration of Prometheus. The God of judgment-day is himself swept away by the destruction of mankind for the sins of commission. And the insignificance of man compared with what he might be is satirically shown in _The Menagerie_.

But let me not create the impression that Moody cannot be delicate. From _Heart’s Wild Flower_:

But where she strays, through blight or blooth, one fadeless flower she wears, A little gift God gave my youth,—whose petals dim were fears, Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears.

From the gentle poem of motherhood, _The Daguerreotype_:

And all is well, for I have seen them plain, The unforgettable, the unforgotten eyes! Across the blinding gush of these good tears They shine as in the sweet and heavy years When by her bed and chair We children gathered jealously to share The sunlit aura breathing myrrh and thyme, Where the sore-stricken body made a clime Gentler than May and pleasanter than rhyme, Holier and more mystical than prayer.

Or from _The Moon-Moth_:

Mountains and seas, cities and isles and capes, All frail as in a dream and painted like a dream, All swimming with the fairy light that drapes A bubble, when the colors curl and stream And meet and flee asunder. I could deem This earth, this air, my dizzy soul, the sky, Time, knowledge, and the gods Were lapsing, curling, streaming lazily Down a great bubble’s rondure, dye on dye, To swell that perilous clinging drop that nods, Gathers, and nods, and clings, through all eternity.

Here, surely, is an American poet who speaks in eternal terms of the new inspiration; one who was sane and blazing at the same time; one who in order to be modern did not need to use a poor imitation of Whitman, screech of boiler factories and exalt a somewhat doubtful brand of democracy; one who was uncompromisingly radical without being feverish; above all, one who succeeded in writing the most beautiful verse without going to London to do it. When one is oppressed with the doubt of American possibilities it is a renewal of faith to turn to him. If Whitman is of our soil, Moody is no less so; through these two the best in us has thus far found its individual expression.

The temptation to quote is one that should not be resisted. And I can think of no better way to send readers to Moody in the present world crisis than to quote the song of Pandora:

Of wounds and sore defeat I made my battle stay; Wingéd sandals for my feet I wove of my delay; Of weariness and fear I made my shouting spear; Of loss, and doubt, and dread, And swift oncoming doom I made a helmet for my head And a floating plume. From the shutting mist of death, From the failure of the breath, I made a battle-horn to blow Across the vales of overthrow. O hearken, love, the battle-horn! The triumph clear, the silver scorn! O hearken where the echoes bring, Down the grey disastrous morn, Laughter and rallying!

If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—_Goethe._

My Friend, the Incurable

II.

On Germanophobia; on the perils of Monomania; on Raskolnikov and Alexander Berkman; on surrogates and sundry subtleties

Ἑυρηκα!—shouted the Incurable, when I came on my monthly call. I have solved the mystery that has baffled your idealists since the outbreak of the War. The puerile effusions of Hardy, Galsworthy, and other Olympians who in the mist of international hostilities confused Nietzsche with Bernhardi, are quite explainable. It is well known that our successful writers have no time or inclination to read other fellows’ books: they leave this task to journalists and book-reviewers. Hence their splendid ignorance of Nietzsche. The advent of great events showered upon the innocent laymen problems, names, and terms that have been a _terra incognita_ to most of them, and justly so: for what has the artist to do with facts and theories,—what is Hecuba to him? But of late it has become “stylish” for men of letters to declare their opinions on all sorts of questions, regardless of the fact that they have as much right to judge those problems as the cobbler has the right to judge pastry. To the aid of the English novelists who wanted to say “something about the war,” but whose information on the subject was zero, came the dear professor Cramb. A quick perusal of his short work[1] supplied the students with an outlook and a view-point, and out came the patriotic cookies to the astonishment of the world. Such, at least, is my interpretation of the mystery.

[1] _Germany and England_, by J. A. Cramb. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]

Professor Cramb’s lectures are not an answer to Bernhardi, as the publisher wants us to believe, but rather a supplement to the work of the barrack-philosopher whose theory of the biological necessity of war is beautifully corroborated with numerous quotations from the most ancient to the most modern philosophers, historians, statesmen, and poets. The general splendidly demonstrates the efficiency of German mind, the ability to utilize the world culture for the Fatherland, to make all thinkers serve the holy idea of war, from Heraclitus’s πὸλεμος πατήρ πάντων to Schiller’s Bride from Messina. Yet I, in my great love for Germany, should advise the Kaiser’s government to appropriate a generous sum for the purpose of spreading far and wide Cramb’s “Answer,” as the highest glorification of Teutonia. No German has expressed more humble respect and admiration for Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other eulogists of the Prussian mailed fist than this English dreamer of a professor. For what but a fantastic dream is his picture of modern Germany as that of a land permeated with heroic aspirations, a mélange of Napoleonism and Nietzscheanism? Nay! it is the burgher, the “culture-philistine” that dominates the land of Wilhelm and Eucken, the petty Prussian, the parvenu who since 1870 has been cherishing the idea of _Weltmacht_ and of the Germanization of the universe.